Hungary is prepared to launch a lawsuit against the European Commission to force Brussels to pay for costs related to the defence of Hungary’s southern border, which is also the EU’s external border.
“The government will demand the reimbursement of the border policing costs from the Commission,” Gergely Gulyás, the Minister of the Prime Minister’s Office said at a press conference on Thursday, September 12th, adding that his government may even file a lawsuit against the Commission to enforce the reimbursement legally.
This is not the first time the conservative government of Hungary has called for Brussels to pay the costs of border protection. Budapest says it has spent €2 billion on the defence of its border since 2015, including erecting a fence to keep out illegal migrants.
However, EU contributions have barely exceeded 1% of the costs, Finance Minister Mihály Varga said at the end of last year. Instead of helping, Brussels has punished Hungary for protecting its border. In June the European Court of Justice ordered Hungary to pay a lump sum of €200 million, with an additional €1 million a day for failing to comply with EU asylum policies, i.e., not allowing migrants into the country until their asylum claim is handled.
The European Commission recently said that Hungary has until September 17th to pay up or the money will be automatically subtracted from the country’s allocated share of the EU budget.
Gergely Gulyás said nobody can be resettled in Hungary against the wishes of the Hungarian people. He referred to the referendum of 2016 in which a clear majority of voters (98%) rejected the possibility of the EU being able to order the obligatory resettlement of non-Hungarian citizens into Hungary without the approval of the Hungarian parliament.
The minister repeated Hungary’s recent warning that if the EU insists on forcing Hungary to accept illegal migrants, the Budapest government would let them in and give them a free one-way ticket to Brussels.
Gulyás also reminded reporters of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s words in 2015 that warned Europe that without proper external border protection, the borderless Schengen Area would collapse, forcing EU member states to reinstate border controls, as Germany has just done.
However, the minister said Hungary would first attempt to negotiate with the EU to recover some of the funds it has spent on border protection, and a lawsuit would only follow if talks break down. “In the case of other Schengen countries, the Commission reimbursed the costs,” Gulyás said.
